


Dancing on the Line

by unkahii



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Bittersweet, F/F, F/M, Guns, Implied Character Death, Mafia AU, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Other, dark themes, i kinda have a love hate relationship with this one, mature bcoz i realise that the metaphors are sorta dark and heavy, so credits to her, the title was suggested by a friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:02:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27405484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unkahii/pseuds/unkahii
Summary: — You and Akaashi lose your senses and dance on the line, as music of destruction blooms into the air.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Reader
Kudos: 5





	1. [drunk]

It’s nothing but the fire of alcohol in your venules, slowly creeping up through all the valves and veins and pouring into your heart in low, rumbling waves. Your addiction is the gunmetal of those eyes.

It is said to lower one’s mental inhibitions. When drunk, one does things they would never dare do when the tiniest bit sober. You don’t know what you are doing too, or more like _why_ you are doing so, when at the end this will only lead to doom. You’re just dancing, the blood in your veins replaced by maddening adrenaline. The heart in your chest beats fast. Even if you’re not running, you feel as if you are—hurrying away from something that keeps desperately keeps chasing at your tail, even if the only thing you did was just to love.

Side by side to your heart, his beats in the same erratic fashion; you don’t move, don’t talk. You only breathe. Heavy, tired breathing expelling from his chest greets the skin of your nape, narrating the same old, same old tale of exhaustion, chase and intoxication.

This will never end well, you know.

-“Keiji, I love you,” you mutter out, an almost childish helplessness in their syllables (which is strange, you think later, given the number of sins committed with these hands of yours—you’re everything but an innocent child). His grip on your body tightens in response, a quiet acknowledgement to the proclamation you made for the umpteenth time. He knows you do.

-“I love you too, Y/n,” he reciprocates; the deep notes of his voice soothe all the trepidations in your body, even those that curdle in your marrows soundlessly. It’s one of the million things about him to which you are addicted. His fingers card through your hair slowly and steadily. Unlike his breaths, tiredness is never present in their movements. Nothing ever is more effective in lulling you into slumber than his touch, not even the strongest, most toxic soporifics.

-“Things are getting worse, Y/n,” Akaashi hums out, “your men are stirring up too much trouble on our turf. If this goes on, then war will end up starting. And we both know what that means.”

You do know. How the curtain of red spilled blood will drape the stage. Bullets will shower out from guns and lifeless bodies stepped on, as the victors lead their drunken parade home.

And where will you in all this?

-“Someday, we’ll have to end up killing each other.”


	2. [smoke]

His, is not a choreographed dance. It’s mindless and driven by pure frenzy of the heart. In other words, it’s just adrenaline charged euphoria, the kind of thrill you get from putting your life on the edge and teetering on the thin line separating the world of living and the world of dead. Only you are not balancing on tightropes but rather dancing on it. Foolish, isn’t it? No doubt yes.

Smoke from the man’s cigarette blossoms into the air in front of him. Akaashi has chosen not to smoke because he already has too many addictions to deal with. However, this time he breathes in the nicotine lingering in the air deeply—a quiet attempt to soothe the turmoil inside his chest.

-“If this reaches the boss’ ears, you’re done for,” Kuroo says, half-threatening and half-concerned. Silence descends upon the small room again and Akaashi decides to idle it away by staying mum. Kuroo thus has to push on.

-“Rumours come into my ears too, Akaashi,” he drawls, before dipping his voice to a whisper and saying, “what’s this I am hearing about a Y/n L/n?”

The sound of your name, even when coming from another man’s lips, sounds scintillating. In the way morphine calms down all the burning pains in one’s body, the notes of your name, the sweet jingle in them comforts his soul.

(It is one of the ten million things about you to which he is addicted. What else is he, Akaashi thinks, other than an addict, a space-cadet of some sorts, who destroys himself each night and each day by running after the thing that holds his rationale hostage, you, to quench his thirst which in this case is to be loved?)

-“There’s nothing,” he replies nonchalantly. Kuroo scoffs, putting the cigarette away in the ashtray. Akaashi watches, a strange doleful sadness raising its head in his heart, as the orange flames are smashed into the blackness.

-“From, Nohebi? Akaashi, seriously?!” Kuroo goes on, “have you just lost it? Where do you think the pride of Fukurodani is going here?”

He doesn’t answer. Not because he is scared to or he is hesitant to lie, but because he truly doesn’t know what to say. He is a sinner who knows his sins, a fool who is aware of his foolishness. Yet he goes on—like a ticking, self-destructing time-bomb, doing what he has been doing. He doesn’t have anything to say.

-“You’ll have to pay a lot more than you can imagine,” Kuroo adds gravely. The itch present in the conversation is growing by the second. And neither does it seem to be heading anywhere at the end. Without sparing another word, therefore he rises up from his seat.

He can feel Kuroo’s narrowed gaze following every twitch and flex of his muscles. Doom is imminent on his life anyways—if he has to die, if he has to be put through infernal torture, why not be true to his heart then (or rather to the gallons of addicting substance he has drank in—love)

-“Stay out of it, Kuroo,” he warns, voice flat. “And better keep Bokuto-san away from it too.”

A pause, neither man spoke.

-“It’s my problem. I know the consequences,” he completes.


	3. [ addict ]

There is something about a drug: your tolerance for the thing is low at first, but the more and more number of times you go back to it, your tolerance for it increases. The receptors in your body refuse to respond to lower levels of the same drug that used to lull you or bring you euphoria before.

You are too deep into it. For Akaashi, the drug is the love that you share.

Alienation has finally reached him. Words that were previously whispers have swollen to the level of loud exchanges. The gazes boring into his back as he makes his way through are filled with venom. This was coming, yes, he knew it—but that’s the deal with being an addict, isn’t it—you stupidly keep coming back to the same thing that mutilated everything you owned.

The pistol feels a little weird in his hand with one of his fingers missing. As he hops into the air-conditioned chill of the car, his thoughts stray back to the time he had his first taste of the wine called you.

It was on a tired night, when the shadows in the bar had grown rather lonely—he had walked in through the doors to be greeted by the sight of an unfamiliar figure sitting hunched up on his favourite spot—the third seat to the right.

The tired movement of you wrist as you swirled the amber liquid in the glass was oddly lifeless. The ice rattled and clanked inside, hitting the cold glass walls over and over again in a monotone. For how long had the drink waited there?

The sight made him shudder and like an insect drawn to light, he was magnetically pulled towards you. The rest of the story from there on is a blur in his head. Akaashi doesn’t know when this mad dance began, when the first notes music bloomed from the background.

Among the incoherent splashes of colour imprinted among his memories, he can only remember the intoxicating e/c of your eyes. The same e/c in which he has plunged head first and drowned.

They say he has a gift with his tongue and with his intellect able to sense the slightest mood changes and calmly form a plan to counteract it and carefully coax out the reaction he so requires. It makes him a useful pawn.

( _Pawn_ , he thinks scathingly and a little bit amused—how falling in love has strangely removed the filters over everything and made him see the lies he never ever saw before.)

Nevertheless, the number of times he has been tongue-tied when confronted with the e/c of your eyes and that lazy smile on your face is way too large. He ends up grinning wistfully at his own reflection on the dark glass of the car’s window at the thought.

True, the tension between Nohebi and Fukurodani and its allies has inflated to an alarming size—like and overblown bubble, the violence is just waiting to burst out. Gang wars are never pretty.

The fact that he hasn’t got to see you since the week before last, said a lot about what had been your fate after the news of your being together reached Nohebi’s boss. Yes, you are alive, he knows that—but for how long, he doesn’t.

The metal of the gun has never felt more comforting. An addiction to something always tears your life apart into minuscule shreds (each fragment meaningless)—Akaashi is no exception to this rule.


	4. [ yellow light ]

-“Good lord...”

No, he doesn’t kneel down out of his own will—rather his knees give away. All force from them is sucked away by the sight in front of his eyes—the blood on your forehead, the gun wound on your chest, the strained heaving of your body and the strange concoction of emotions in your eyes, shivering like lonely leaves on a barren tree branch (hopelessly), one that spelt out a dry apology.

_“I am sorry, Keiji”_

-“Don’t be,” he blurts out breathlessly. His arms are unsteady and they pathetically shake. Yet, Akaashi makes a hopeless attempt to scoop you up. “What for, Keiji?” you question, an odd lopsided smile on your face. “I am gonna die anyways. You did your job, congratulations.”

A frown is the only thing his facial muscles have a chance of morphing into. Your words are morbid. They unnerve him.

-“Keep quiet,” he says irritably, fumbling about to find something that will stop the bleeding. “Save your strength. We are going.”

-“And what will happen to you after that, have you thought about it?”

Akaashi’s movements pause and the thread like ray of hope that he was clutching onto till now, suddenly vaporises into the dark air. It is no more there.

Then it hits him—the cold, cruel reality of the situation. For a moment (a fraction of a split second), everything stops, including his breath and from the queer tightening of his chest, he feels as if his heart does too.

The truth stares at him, its dull eyes gleaming ominously through the lack of light.

-“What would l happen to _us_ if I were to make it alive?”

What will...will you run away? Where is there to escape to? The Yakuza network sprawls through the entire land, like the sticky web spun by a vicious spider. There’s nowhere to escape.

-“We are doomed anyways,” you announce finally.

His head refuses to work now, when faced with utter despair. Even Akaashi’s calm and calculative brain freezes up. Out of the blue, he has the urge to cry, to sob, to wail, to let the helplessness building up inside him flow out. But instead of the gushing tsunami tides that would have brought him cathartic relief, they leak out in narrow rivulets—staining the sides of his cheeks.

-“No,” is all he says. You grin wider, wry.

-“Yes, we are. I am dead, your boss will be glad.”

Dead? First, the notes echo with a hollow sound in the recesses of his mind and next, there is a sudden flash of yellow light. An intersection, a crossroad, a choice. The yellow light means “stop or go”.

Your eyes follow his hands as he fishes out his own revolver and puts it into your hand. It does take some time for realisation to descend on you, but when it does, you truly don’t know what to feel.

-“See you in hell then,” Akaashi offers with a smile similar to your own. That smile never fails to make him look otherworldly, ethereal. He is the same someone (who appeared to be built of magic, like a happy dream in a hellscape) you had run into at a bar many, many months ago. The gunmetal of his eyes is still your addiction.

Lifting your hand up and placing the gun where he wants it to, is impossible for you, both mentally and physically speaking. The sound of raining bullets in the background abruptly grows louder. The scuffle, the scurrying of footsteps, the crashing of boxes, curses expulsed into the air violently turn you deaf, and what remains of your rationale, non-functional.

But that’s what it means to be an addict—losing yourself to the curse of something. You and Akaashi lose your senses too and dance on the line, as music of destruction blooms into the air. You heart flutters against your ribcage in that very familiar song. You can only meet his gunmetal gaze when shrouded by shadows, when even the gatekeepers of hell sleep. One, two, three, four, repeat.

Your arm, though powerless, rises. An entire life spent away living at gun point. There is the fresh weight of a gun over your heart too.

Yellow light means stop or go. You go.

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on unkahee.tumblr.com | if you found this here raenah, you know this was inspired by your ask. once again thanks for sending the prompt, this fic has some of my favourite lines of all time.


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